US Copyright Group Finally Files Some Other Lawsuits... In Minnesota

from the let's-wait-and-see dept

We've been waiting for US Copyright Group to refile some of its lawsuits in the proper jurisdictions, fully expecting that the operation (really DC law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) would file a few lawsuits here and there to prove that it really was suing some people, though we doubt it'll match the scale of the original, "shock and awe," 5,000 people at a time filings. Apparently US CG has now filed two lawsuits in Minnesota, outside of its home base in DC. I would expect more like this, though let's see how far the lawsuits really get. It's no secret that the only purpose of the lawsuits is to convince people to pay up to avoid a lawsuit.

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I think the appropriate analogy would be: "I will steal my next car from you if you don't give me what I want."

First (and you know this is coming), copying is not stealing. Second, how is this stealing from them specifically? I'm planning on getting the content from a completely different source if they don't provide me with a reason to purchase it from them. I won't even use their bandwidth.

Your example has the threatened response as being something legal. That's not what's happening here, as pointed out by Anonymous. The threat here is of illegal action.

So if the government decided tomorrow that citizens were only allowed to buy GM cars from now on (the cynical side of me says that we're not far out from there anyway, but I digress), then a threat from me to buy a Toyota instead of a GM becomes extortion due to its illegality?

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You got that wrong. The lesson is:

There is a one in a million chance some nut lawyer might file a bogus and poorly researched lawsuit against me. Also, he will back-off once I show that I am smarter than the average guy and I decide to challenge him in court. Finally, we learn that they are just in this to try to make some quick cash out of ignorant people who would rather settle (and avoid the trouble altogether) rather than protect anyone's rights.

Ya know...

Although we might bicker on some of the minutia, I think there are probably enough of us here, who agree that the laws should be changed, to formally petition for a change in the laws. Yes, I realize that we are all spread throughout the country and/or world, but those few legally-minded (not me) should be able to draft something up that could be easily edited to apply to respective local laws....
Just a thought.

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I wonder about that. All I ever seem to hear from one side on this site and other technology sites is "you do the crime, you do the time" (an exact quote for some, paraphrase of others). As such I wonder whether they would actually agree that the laws should be changed at all*.

The law was designed to stop others from actually stealing your work and then packaging it and selling it themselves denying you profit. This is why the award number is so high. This was never meant to try to extract $150K per song from a 16 yr old who made a mix tape for the cute girl he likes.

And now this law is being used to extort money from people sharing files. We can get up to $150K so pay us $3000 its faster. Don't pay any attention to how how "evidence" was collected, and that a 10 yr old can point out huge flaws in it pointing to you. Don't take any time to think about it because you owe us an additional $1000 if you don't pay us in a week.

Let us keep the $150k awards against those who actually produce copies and sell them for profit. Lets knock down the awards for individuals to the "actual" damages that they might have lost. The cost of the DVD in the Walmart discount rack. Do you think these lawyers would be stomping on people to get their cut of $19.97?

Instead of cranking the dial to 11, why not spend a small part of the money your wasting on these tactics and find out why people are sharing your work?
Why not try to find a way where both sides win, rather than seeing the customer as a piece of meat to be hung up and cut chunks out of over and over.

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Don't forget one more thing: there's a reason that the statutory rate is per work infringed and not per copy produced (in fact it used to be the latter, but was changed for this reason): because per-copy damages produced too large statutory awards in the case where (commercial) counterfeiters produced very large numbers of copies of a handful of works. That bears repeating: it was done that way to REDUCE statutory damage awards for large-scale commercial counterfeiting.

So yes, applying these statutory damage values to individuals making a single copy of the work for non-commercial purposes is about as far from the intent of the law as it's theoretically possible to be.

US Copyright Group is still filing the suits against 1000's of does. They took over the failed cases against porn downloaders in West Virginia and filed them in DC with new lists of does. One of the cases has over 5,000 does. They have the same issue with thousands of people from all over the country participating in torrents in a 2-3 month period that shouldn't be joindered together and should be sued in their own district court. They know their business model works best when they can pay $350 and extort $1,500-$5,000 per settlement out of thousands of people.

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Which, as far as I can tell, is nothing but an extortion racket. Unless it's a class action (where the numbers are inverted in this case, so I doubt it), then they can't be lumped together.

Why haven't these folks been disbarred yet?

I don't think anyone is going to be disbarred over this anytime soon for the simple reason that they're not doing anything legally wrong. It's not extortion in the legal sense.

There is the exception in the "Far Cry" case where USCG is being sued for extortion and some other things, but that's a unique situation. Even if USCG loses that case, I can't imagine they'll be disbarred. They'll just pay some money.

You don't have to have a class action in order to lump people together. You can have joinder under Rule 20 (what we have here), a class action under Rule 23, or a consolidation under Rule 42.

Under Rule 20:

Persons . . . may be joined in one action as defendants if:

(A) any right to relief is asserted against them jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and

(B) any question of law or fact common to all defendants will arise in the action.

USCG has argued that (A) is met because each member of a torrent swarm is participating in the same series of transactions or occurrences that can be traced back to the same peer.

They argued that (B) is met because whether the defendants used bittorrent to download the movie is a common question of fact, and whether the defendants infringed the copyright is a common question of law.

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And let us not forget Evan Stone and the Copyright Defense Agency... who uses an unmodified client to capture IP addresses. Can someone please explain how a single person, pretending to be a company, can participate in the swarm and actually download the file and not face the same charges? Isn't he facilitating this horrible crime? He got his own copy of the file, and helped others complete theirs. One has to wonder if there isn't a law against making a crime worse to improve your position to extract money.

Of course I still wonder how they get all those addresses just joining an existing swarm, think how many you can get if your the origin point and change the settings to make it take a long time for multiple copies to go out. Then you might have thousands of IP addresses to bring into court. Things that make you go WTF. But of course as not a single case will make it to court, no one gets to raise these issues where it counts. Because 1 ruling of IP != 1 user ends this entire shakedown scheme. Having to have actual proof rather than smoke and mirrors really would put a crimp in these "extortion mills".

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And let us not forget Evan Stone and the Copyright Defense Agency... who uses an unmodified client to capture IP addresses. Can someone please explain how a single person, pretending to be a company, can participate in the swarm and actually download the file and not face the same charges? Isn't he facilitating this horrible crime? He got his own copy of the file, and helped others complete theirs. One has to wonder if there isn't a law against making a crime worse to improve your position to extract money.

Evan Stone or his agents can participate in the swarm and not face the same charges for the simple reason that they are authorized to do so by the copyright holder. Stone and Co. downloaded the file being offered up by the defendants to make sure it was in fact their client's IP. That isn't facilitating the crime as you suggest. The defendants were already offering up the file, so it's not entrapment or anything like that. As far as Stone and Co. offering up the file for the defendants to download goes, I don't think that's an issue. The claims, as far as I know, are for the defendants offering up the file for others to download. The claim isn't that the defendants downloaded the file offered up by Stone and Co. For all we know, Stone and Co. didn't offer the file up for others to download at all. The complaints are sealed, I believe, so we can't really know either way. Not that it matters, though.

Of course I still wonder how they get all those addresses just joining an existing swarm, think how many you can get if your the origin point and change the settings to make it take a long time for multiple copies to go out. Then you might have thousands of IP addresses to bring into court. Things that make you go WTF. But of course as not a single case will make it to court, no one gets to raise these issues where it counts. Because 1 ruling of IP != 1 user ends this entire shakedown scheme. Having to have actual proof rather than smoke and mirrors really would put a crimp in these "extortion mills".

I should think it would be a simple matter to join an existing swarm for a period of several months while collecting the IP addresses of those who join the swarm. If USCG is really going to be suing defendants in 15 different jurisdictions (these two cases in Minnesota just being the beginning), then I bet we will see a few cases decided on the merits. Considering that USCG can cherry-pick the "best" defendants to sue individually out of the thousands they have to choose from, I don't predict that this will go well for the defendants. As far as the idea that one ruling that an IP doesn't equal one user will somehow end any of this, I think that's nonsense. Courts already know that. The idea is that the IP address forms part of prima facie evidence of infringement by the subscriber of that IP address. It's similar to if your car gets used in a bank robbery and the security cameras catch your license plate. The cops are going to get a warrant and come to your house to investigate. Maybe you robbed the bank, or maybe somebody stole your car and robbed the bank. That doesn't matter. The cops will be following the lead. That's all the IP addresses are in these cases--they're leads. And despite your claim to the contrary, such leads are very much actual evidence.

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Files can be mismarked, how could Stone and Co. know they file is what it claimed to be beforehand? Should they turn themselves in if they downloaded something they had no rights to?

By staying in the swarm and supplying chunks of data they helped others complete the horrible crime. Even ACS tried to use a client that shared nothing, rather than a standard client that uploaded and downloaded. As they shared an authorized copy of the movie does that mean the copies are authorized as well? They are after all identical.

And the IP = license plate analogy is flawed as well. Very few people have static addresses, and a time difference as little as a few minutes can lead to a different person. This case is dealing with screenshots and notes on a spreadsheet taken by 1 person. Former middle manager at a cell company does not qualify you as an expert on bittorrent nor make you perfect. If the IP was so concrete why would Stone also request MAC Addresses? Not like those can't be altered either.

Given it has been over 4 months and the John Doe case is still open in violation of the rules of the court, one has to wonder what is going on in Texas.

Having lost Larry Flynt as a client, and is now revisiting those cases he filed to get himself noticed in the extortion mill game.

Stone has made statements that IP = User. In fact his entire extortion mill is based on people believing his misinformation. Given the amount of time since his first filing it is obvious he really does have no intention of taking a case to court, rather relying on letters using the same scammy tactics bill collectors use.

That you have a screen shot claiming to show an IP address doing something, someone made an awesome website that generated fake screen shots during the Pirate Bay trial, seems lacking as solid evidence.

The difference between the police and the bottom feeders is there is actually investigation on the part of the police.

The bottom feeders are claiming the IP address is enough to get them up to $150k so you should pay the $3000 they want. The only contact is a form letter demanding the money and an extra $1000 if you make them wait a week. And here is our secure credit card payment portal online. They are unwilling to hear the idea the person they targeted is innocent. The bar to try to prove your innocent is the around the same cost, this is abuse of process. Forcing legal decisions to be based on economics or kept private to avoid embarrassment. Everyone remembers someone was accused of touching children, so few notice the story of him being cleared.

Wifi can be hacked, houses can have visitors, IP addresses can be spoofed, ISPs can install Wifi routers and leave them open for people unaware of the existence of WiFi in their home. These are all possibilities that are not considered as the lawyers chase the dollars. If someone steals your car and uses it to commit a crime you should not be liable for anothers actions.

USCG is cherry picking those who the databrokers tell them have the funds available to pay them a large settlement. The downside of going after people with money is they hate to part with it, and are more than willing to make an example out of the people pursuing them wrongfully. Making decisions based on economics seems to be more important that protecting the valuable intellectual property.

I am willing to bet the poor 80 yr old man they tried to shake down who has no children or visitors to his home will make a compelling witness as someone completely innocent caught up in a flawed dragnet. He had open wifi that his ISP installed without informing him of it. It surely was an up-chargeable item on the install. He and his wife barely use email but they are meant to have been bittorrent wizards who stole a film and now owe $3000.

We need to stop pretending these cases are about stopping filesharing.

These cases are some lawyers trying to import the ACS:Law template and get paid. They play fast and loose with the facts all in an attempt to create pressure on people who may or may not have infringed. It does not matter to the firms, they just want their chance to get you to write them a check. It seems rather transparent this is why some of them still seek out porn studios, so that their extortion attempts have extra impact of ruining someone guilty or not. "Your name is not public yet, but if we have to file suit people will know. Pay us and we do not file suit."

Isn't one of the famous quotes about the law - It is better to let an guilty person go free than to imprison an innocent? Now it seems to be pay or we try to ruin your life guilty or not.

If they want to build an actual case and take it to trial thats fine. However, anybody with half a brain can see what the money making scheme here is. These cases are simply tools to scare more people into settling regardless of their guilt or innocence.

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If they want to build an actual case and take it to trial thats fine. However, anybody with half a brain can see what the money making scheme here is. These cases are simply tools to scare more people into settling regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Maybe so, but if millions of people weren't intentionally breaking the law with illegal file-sharing, these lawsuits wouldn't be possible to begin with. The blame for these lawsuits lies on the pirates, not the rights holders.

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then make a case against an actual pirate. Sending out settlement requests knowing damn well that you are sweeping up the innocent because its cheaper to pay than to fight is plain wrong. Make a case with some due dilligance against a named defendant with more than just an IP address and a name and THEN make your offer.

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then make a case against an actual pirate. Sending out settlement requests knowing damn well that you are sweeping up the innocent because its cheaper to pay than to fight is plain wrong. Make a case with some due dilligance against a named defendant with more than just an IP address and a name and THEN make your offer.

How are they supposed to know which defendants are pirates and which are innocent? The only way to do more due diligence would be to sue the defendant and commence further discovery. This alone would cost the defendant more than the price of settling. How is that better?

Fraudulent Reviews

You all need to let the lawyers know what you think of their money-making scheme by completing a review on Google - see http://goo.gl/J3ZvE. Several of us posted reviews earlier letting the world know what kind of lawyers these people are, but recently the firm apparently had a couple of people post strangely positive reviews, which now appear at the top. I have no doubt the lawyers posted the fake reviews themselves. More of us need to post reviews of Dunlap Grubb & Weaver on Google and elsewhere so that people know the truth about them

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When they sue 10's of thousands, I'll believe that they are not bluffing. You will see an handful in each juristiction that they find a firm to team up with. So far ony 1 other firm joined them. they have some in MN and the rest they are handling themselves.

I do not agree with downloading for free, but the extortion tactics are no better. 2 wrongs don't make a right. $150,000 for 1 move or song, ha ha. Funny how they say that they are intitled to that much. It's also funny how they call it theft, it's infringement, not theft. No property was stolen. It is and always will be copyright infringement. Download a move and you're not a scumbag thief, you're a scumbag copyright infringer.

There was a time I favored the movie/music industry, but they've proven to be just as bad if not worse than the downloaders. Lies, deception, extortion, I'm on the other side now. This is not about getting actors, singers and all the workers involved paid. This is about tuning crimes into cash flow on a massive scale.

HelpingHand

We would like to see Geraldo Rivera, CNN, to name a few interview US Copyright Group. We need media help on investigating the practices of this Washington small office law firm. We need Washington and Virgina (google Dunlaps resume on internet) Bar Association members and ask is this the quality of lawyers you produce. We need letters to television and radio report desk and anchor journalist asking who are these groups US Copyright Group and Copyright Infrigment Group. We letters to State Representatives in every state. Every State General Attorney asking that they please step in and change copyright laws. We need congress to put a monetary cap and take it out of the hands of lawyers like US Copyright Group. First offense situations should never hammer a parent of a child minor with a $2,900 settlement. Most college universities charge a fine of $25.00 for 1st offense. This needs to be on the forefront with congress before copycat lawfirms jump in on the mass mailing entrampment-extortion-dragnet-shackdown-black mail-intimidating-bullying-dirty birderline mafia like practice of pay now or-(racketeering*maybe)strong holding method that is going on currently. Letters- letters -Letters !

Just venting simutaneusly (sp). Dont care to see Geraldo or CNN,. no interviews for US Copyright group. We thank them for dropping the Hurtlocker lawsuits as read over the waves in the past 3 days. I have had a mental breakdown with all this. Glad they are Good people now. No letters, letters, letter writing for me now. Was gonna but not now.

Would be nice

hipp hipp horray I beleive Hurtlocker is on a cease fire with people for a while. I have to read more about it.Would be nice to be able to see one of the DGW people on a interview though,see what they are all about. Curious like everyone else.But now that things are calm down I dont expect we will see them on Geraldo.haha (kidding-where is Geraldo anymore anyway)Think the opeing of the tumbstone thing on national tv and nothing was in it,did him in.Lets stop all this mass mailing and give people a chance especially on a first offense. I believe people have learned thier lessons. Cant Congress help in making things better?